The Cries of the Condemned
by DDG
Summary: Fifty sentences on the Prison Break cast, the variety of characters and plethora of possibilities.


**Title:** The Cries of the Condemned (in Fifty Spectrums of Cacophonic Resilience)  
**Character(s):** Most of them.  
**Pairing(s):** A multitude.  
**Genre:** Gen, Het, Slash, AU, Humor.  
**Rating:** PG to R  
**Word Count:** 2557  
**Summary:** Fifty sentences on the Prison Break cast, the variety of characters and plethora of possibilities.  
**Author's Notes:** Written for 1fandom. Quote in "civilization" from ThinkExist, quoted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. And thanks to steralizetheemo for being awesome and helping me out with "Bell," "Attraction," "Pool," and "Gentle." :)  
**Spoilers:** The entire first season.   
**Warnings:** Swearing, sex, violence, addiction, slash, het, rape, arson, lust and a whole lotta other stuff.  
**Beta:** The amazing alayzsod :)

* * *

**SINK**  
They've called him "Linc the Sink" for as long as he can remember, and now the name's become nearly synonymous with "Burrows" and "Lincoln" and he's afraid he'll never be able to live it down, as partially untrue as it is.

**SAND**  
The sand was unrelenting, torrential – almost like rain, in it's own way – and on the real windy days it was everywhere – in his clothes, his eyes, and even in more uncomfortable places, where it became difficult to simply wash away with one shower.

**BLAZE**  
His fourth grade science teacher failed him because she said he didn't comprehend the material she'd taught – which wasn't true, because Teddy sure as hell understand what the bitch babbled on about, day after day, he just didn't see what use he had for science in the real world; he set her house on fire a week later, just to show her how much he really "comprehended" science.

**COUNT**  
The bulls make their scheduled rounds and Sucre bites his lip in anticipation because count makes him nervous nowadays – Michael's always behind the walls, doing _something_, and every night turns into a "close call" as Michael spends more and more time away, until Sucre finally has to use his pillows to stuff Michael's bed; he's more nervous than any night before this when the bull flashes a light into the cell before checking "Scofield" and "Sucre" off a list and moving on.

**BULLET**  
It's been who knows how long since he's had to do the dirty work himself, but sometimes a point needs to be made and a bullet to the head from John Abruzzi is the only way to do it.

**TEST**  
It hardly looks anything like a cell phone, Michael thinks, turning the soap over in his hands, examining it's every curvature, feature and bump, the thin lines separating the "buttons," and he wonders if maybe he should paint numbers too – but, he figures, the lack of numbers won't be obvious to the casual observer and regardless, he's finding it harder and harder to believe that this is going to work anyway.

**MAZE**  
He wishes the pipes running through Fox River were like a hedge maze – that if he could just put his left hand to the wall, he could follow it along until he found his way and then maybe it wouldn't be so crucial that he coerces an inmate by the name of Charles Patoshik into remembering the missing piece in the puzzle.

**RUN**  
His chest is heaving and his legs are aching and his heart's beating _too fast, too much_ but he _can't quit now_ because he can _feel_ and _hear_ and could certainly _see_ the damn dogs right on his heels if he just turned around – but he can't, he _can't_, he has to keep running (_fasterfasterfaster_) because they're _so close_ now and the river up ahead looks more like freedom than anything else ever has.

**ART**  
It's more than just art, it's, it's, it's something else, something that Haywire doesn't quite know what, he just knows that it's _something_ more than the normal something you might see in a tattoo, because there's more there, hidden beneath all that ink and it looks like a pattern with delicately drawn vertical and horizontal lines, but he's not sure, because Michael won't let him get a close enough look to find out.

**HEAL**  
She thinks if she heals enough people enough times, she can heal the scars of her past and make it all go away – but it won't because things like addiction don't just _go away_ and she's painfully reminded of this by Bellick daily.

**ROOM**  
When the mob finally decided to cash in their favor, they shoved him in a little room with one dingy light bulb and a chair, and threatened to torture him (guns wielded threateningly by men standing in a circle around him, a knife to his throat by the one leaning over him to growl in his ear, and another behind him, holding his head steady – as if they really thought he'd try anything) if he didn't concede – and he wouldn't defy them, because that would more than promise him certain death at the hands of these men.

**PREY**  
His pretty lawyer took his hand into hers and smiled before grimly telling him, "Don't let yourself get preyed upon, Seth, because those guys in there, they aren't afraid of anything and they'll eat you right up."

**STILL**  
Considering the rate he usually went through cell mates, it was an interesting surprise to find bruised and bloody little Maytag still alive, sitting on the floor across from his bunk, just watching as T-Bag slept, the morning after their second month together.

**MENTAL**  
By now, everyone had fallen into the assumption that Bellick was quite clearly "mental" to have let his mother move in, and Bellick wasn't about to admit to everyone that he only did it because his momma had threatened to tell all his coworkers about some rather "unfortunate" incidents during his childhood if he didn't take her in.

**CRUSH**  
Michael called it one-sided hopefulness – Veronica called Michael an idiot and went chasing after Lincoln again.

**BOLD**  
He was only as bold as he looked, which apparently wasn't bold enough, because he couldn't kill Kellerman when he had the chance – but he could always blame that on his inefficiency with a gun, if anyone asked.

**SOFT**  
He didn't like thinking about it, but as morbid as it was, Westmoreland was undoubtedly aware of just how soft Marilyn's fur was – even matted together with dry blood.

**THOUGHT**  
He'd thought that Michael was different, that he wasn't like all the others – but now, as he's wheeled into his office closet, he supposes he was wrong, because inmates who are different from all the rest don't use shanks to threaten the warden into submission.

**DECADE**  
It's been more than a decade since they've met, and Kellerman can't say it hasn't been a fun ride, but he's left wondering now, as Caroline is sworn in, what her plans are.

**FAREWELL**  
Every time he says goodbye to his wife, he tells her how much he loves her and kisses her, because with a job like his, he can never be sure if it'll be his last farewell.

**FOCUS**  
He keeps telling himself to focus, he's gotta fucking focus or else he's never going to be able to go through with it – so he raises the gun, sets his face in grim determination and walks up to Terrence Steadman's car.

**COAST**  
Terrence always wanted to live in a small house on the coast – but Caroline insisted a mansion in Montana was better, and after all, she added, it's got the greatest view, better than any house on the ocean would have.

**CIRCLE**  
Jimmy usually circles Teddy's block a few times in his truck before stopping and making his way up to the door – the first time to see if Teddy's daddy is his home, and if Daddy is home, he makes a second trip around to see if Teddy's going to come climbing out of a window and running to the truck with his Daddy yelling at him in a drunken fit from inside.

**JEALOUS**  
Lincoln crosses his arms and shouts, "I hate him!" before stomping off to his room while Mama Scofield stares after her eldest son, her youngest sniffling with the beginnings of a crying spell in her arms.

**DOLL**  
Teddy played with dolls because they were the only friends he had, even when his daddy stole them and burned them in the backyard then yelled at Teddy and called him a sissy, he still played with them – they were just a little more burnt the next time.

**CURL**  
He curled up on the bed of the horse trailer, uncaring of the fact his clothes were collecting hay and dirt and who knows what else, and cried because he felt just as lost and abandoned now as he did his first night at Fox River.

**STORY**  
He's always concocting tales filled with the usual macho bullshit because he thinks it makes him look tougher – but T-Bag's the only one who really knows that Maytag got that scar across his abdomen when his little girlfriend beat him up and nearly killed him, and he's not afraid to tell the rest of the general population if the boy doesn't stop pouting at him.

**POOL**  
They unanimously decided it was okay to get out of the apartment they were crammed into and go for a swim in the (mostly) abandoned pool behind the building – but they didn't exactly expect T-Bag to come sauntering in stark naked.

**SERPENT**  
He slithers around Fox River like a king, hissing and snarling and rattling his mouth off at whoever crosses his path, and he's heard more than one comparison of himself to a snake before Michael makes the analogy.

**FRIEND**  
They've been friends for what seems like forever now, and Tyler Robert Hudson never had a second thought that accepting Brad Bellick's offer to become an officer at Fox River penitentiary would cost him his life.

**EXHAUSTED**  
Exhaustion plagues them both as they lay insipidly beside one another, naked, a chill wind gusting across their bodies through the cracks between the door and its frame.

**HOOK**  
He had a fishhook shoved into his eye when he was nine, a bullet shot into his arm when he was eleven and his toes hammered when he was fifteen; suffice to say, John Abruzzi never forgets to pay off his debts and makes sure that no one else does either.

**WILL**  
It takes Sara all the willpower in the world not to pick up a needle every evening after work and shoot up, but she manages to stop herself with the mere thought of Bellick's triumphant sneer at finding out she broke.

**JOY**  
The thought of seeing his wife and kids again brings something like a smile to his face as he makes his way through another day at Fox River – and while the smell of death and carnage has become familiar to him by now, the feeling of joy that fills his body as he remembers hugging and kissing and being with his family is even more familiar than that.

**HUNGER**  
There's no food in the fridge (Linc's been gone for awhile now) and his stomach's starting to rumble – but he'll be damned if the dead rat in the corner isn't starting to look pretty appetizing at this point.

**MUTE**  
Any screams he even considers making are instantly muted by the fact that no one will hear them anyway – so he does the only thing he can think of: he pulls out a knife and carves "O. KRAVECKI" into the rock with a maddeningly furious desire to make sure the asshole who condemned him goes down with him.

**ABSENCE**  
He hates it when Lincoln's gone, because he never knows when he'll be back or if he'll even come back at all – and on those days that he doesn't come back, he goes through the motions of picking up a newspaper and scanning the obituaries before moving to the recent arrests section, and if all else fails, he grabs the phone and works through the speed dial, calling up all of the local hospitals.

**CLOSE**  
Nick keeps a gun close at night because he can never be sure when the mob will come knocking – but the metal underneath his fingers is cold, filled with unfamiliarity, a lingering scent of death, and Nick's not sure he's comfortable with the thing beneath his pillow anymore, even with the safety on.

**REIGN**  
John Abruzzi's reign over Nick Savrinn is made plain after the man forces Nick to bend over the desk, and since then, Nick's never questioned John and John's never had too much trouble finding a reason to fuck Nick.

**PRESSURE**  
There's a facade at play, a perfectly erected screen of emotions and drama held between them, and no one doubts what they see because it's not like they have any reason to doubt the plainly obvious – even though the pressure of John Abruzzi's body against T-Bag's own says different and tells a whole other story.

**ECHO**  
He thinks there's an echo in the room because he's fairly sure he's heard the words being shouted at him before, but when they're repeated a third time and finally penetrate through the foggy haze in his mind, he knows he's going to jail (again) and he knows Michael's going to be pissed (again).

**CIVILIZATION**  
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," T-Bag says to him one day, and Trokey has to admit: he really doesn't understand what the hell T-Bag is talking about half the time, or where in the hell he gets that kind of shit.

**BED**  
The bed's hard, the food sucks and he's slightly perturbed at his cell mate's nighttime activities, but Manche knows this is prison, and things really can't get much better than what he's got.

**CLEAR**  
After their first meeting, Caroline Reynolds made it very clear to Paul Kellerman that they would be spending _a lot_ of time together over the next few years.

**CRUSH**  
All it took were three little buttons on his cell phone (_Hello? 9-1-1? Yes, I'd like to report a robbery . . ._) and Hector had finally crushed all of Fernando's silly hopes and dreams.

**QUICKEN**  
He quickened his pace when he heard sirens, fast walking down the sidewalk, hoping that maybe, maybe, he could make it around the corner in time and take off into the dark alley, find that manhole he'd scouted out months ago after meeting Susan, because the sewers were the only place he could fathom the cops would never look for him in case she ratted him out – but the cops had caught up, slammed him against the wall, tore his shirt, shoved him down, and it was with the familiar snap of handcuffs around his wrists that he knew he'd never see the outside of prison walls again.

**GENTLE**  
"He's not a toy, Lincoln, you have to be gentle," his mother scolds, and Lincoln looks at his hands regretfully while his baby brother cries softly into Mama's shoulder.

**ATTRACTION**  
He's jealous, and it's petty, he knows, but he can't help being jealous when his little brother's getting all the attention from the man he's disgustingly found himself steadily attracted to – and Lincoln can't help but be painfully aware he hates T-Bag for all the wrong reasons.

**FENCE**  
His wife had never dreamed of white picket fences surrounding the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood that clouds most little girls fantasies, but she'd certainly never dreamed of being forced into witness protection either.

**BELL**  
It's always a less-than-pleasant shock when Michael finds himself pinned to a wall by T-Bag, and he can never help but mention, "Why hasn't anyone put a bell around your neck yet?"


End file.
